Accidents

“The pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed while maneuvering for approach to land. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s operation of the airplane above the design gross weight.” Such was the verdict of the National Transportation Safety Board as to the probable cause of the fatal crash of a Cessna 172 at St. Petersburg-Clearwater airport […]

In June 2006 a Beech B36TC Bonanza, fresh out of annual inspection, lost power while cruising at 5,000 feet on the way from Kalamazoo to Ypsilanti, Michigan. Although conditions were day VMC, the 950-hour pilot had filed an IFR flight plan. He advised the controller of the situation and asked for a vector to the […]

In 2007, two airplanes crashed a month apart, in somewhat similar circumstances. Both were light sport aircraft of European manufacture; both had two aboard; both stalled and spun from low altitude. In its findings of probable cause in the two accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board raised issues that should be of concern to light […]

At a recent dinner gathering, a few days after the wonderfully well-omened US Airways ditching in the Hudson, when several guests had been grilling me about bird strikes and ditching procedures, someone commented that her worst nightmare was being in an airplane when the pilot had a heart attack. “How often,” another guest asked me, […]

Back in my youthful exuberance days, I and another guy (whose name and face both now elude my memory) used to compete to see how short we could land a Cessna 150. The answer was, pretty short. We would come in hanging on the edge of a stall and stomp on the brakes the moment […]

On the afternoon of March 3, 2000, a helicopter operated by a Miami television station crashed in a suburban neighborhood, killing the pilot and the photographer who was with him. According to early press reports, a witness on the ground had seen the tail rotor “snap off” as the helicopter performed some sort of maneuver. […]

Three years ago I wrote about an accident involving a pilot who became impatient waiting for a stratus layer to lift, and went out looking for a break (or its ambiguous cousin, a “thin spot”) through which he could climb to VFR on top. That accident took place in Los Angeles, and I described the […]

When a Beech Sierra flown by a 4,000-hour commercial pilot, accompanied by his wife and daughter, arrived at the Fulton County Airport at Wauseon, Ohio, the wind was from the west-southwest at 26 to 35 knots, with gusts as high as 43 knots. The VFR flight from Troy, Michigan, a distance of only 76 nm, […]

On Christmas night, 2006, it was foggy in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Briscoe Field was reporting half a mile visibility in fog, with the ceiling at 100 feet, when a Cessna 414A arrived from Florida on an instrument flight plan. The 44-year-old commercial pilot had logged over 400 of his 632 hours in the airplane in which […]

I went to a Catholic grammar school (where they actually taught grammar, by the way — a dying art). The Sisters of the Holy Cross, always eager to tamp down heresy among the 10-year-olds, dealt with the conundrum of evil and God’s will (if God is all-good, why does He allow bad things to happen?) […]